3.18 Release Notes Items

Changes in GNOME 3.18, to be potentially mentioned in the release notes.

Please note that this does not need to be pretty. It's just a list that will be used to make the actual release notes.

See also the advice about the schedule and translation.

How-to

Major changes are those that:

• Affect lots of people (users, administrators, or developers.)
• Are something people have been hoping for or discussing widely.
• Feature, usability, performance, internationalization or accessibility improvements.

Provide this information:

• What the module (application) is.
• What the change is.
  • Why it is important.
  • How it can be accessed.

Be as descriptive as you like. Better too long than too short. Links and screenshots are very welcome!

GNOME 3.18

• https://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/FeaturePlans

What's new for users

Shell

• Weather information in the date and time drop down (hasn't landed; it's uncertain whether it will)

• Refined system status menu.

• Restyled dialog windows - buttons are now connected - which are consistent with GTK+ message dialogs.

Control Center

• Bluetooth sharing settings moved to the Bluetooth panel, to make them easier to discover.

Scrolling

Kinetic scrolling works with touchpads now

New mouse bindings on scrollbars:

• Primary click warps to location
• Shift-Primary click jumps by pages

• Secondary click starts variable-speed autoscrolling <- this is a new feature

Touch selection

Greatly improved handling of text selection with touch:

• Bigger, nicer drag handles for modifying text selections.
• New popovers for cut/copy/paste etc.
• Fixed RTL appearance
• Behavioural changes - touch selection defaults to per-word selection, text edition popover is now toggleable by tapping on the selection, ...

Multitouch touchpad gestures

Use multitouch gestures on your touchpad! This feature is only available under Wayland.

List of gestures that are supported:

• 4-finger vertical swipes to switch workspace

• Out of the box zoom/rotate support in applications using GtkGesture infrastructure (evince,eog,?)

Nautilus

• New UI for ongoing operations.

File Chooser

• New type to search feature, compatible with other GNOME 3 applications.
• Usable with a touchscreen, thanks to the use of popovers for context menus.
• Improved feedback about where files are in Recent view and search view.
• New places view
• Lots of other polish - better feedback for no search results, repositioned file name entry when saving.

Files

Shared between Nautilus and the file chooser:

• Other places view - a single location to view local volumes and network locations (known servers, windows networks, avahi networks). This allows the sidebar to be much less cluttered, and is more manageable if you have a lot of these locations.
• Remote search isn't recursive - doesn't hammer network bandwidth (shared with Nautilus).
• Updated places sidebar - better drag and drop feedback for creating bookmarks.
• New UI for creating folders, renaming files/folders.

Google drive support:

• Google Drive automatically appears as a remote filesystem when a Google is added to Online Accounts.
• Only works when you are online.
• Can open natively supported files using your regular apps (such as PDFs, images, etc).
• Google Drive specific files are opened using the browser (for example: documents, spreadsheets, maps).
• You can add files to your drive through file paste.

Characters

New application that previewed in 3.16. Has now matured, with a number of fixes and features.

• Improved UI for filtering by font.
• Update to Unicode 8.0.0.
• New character category "Letters", which shows locale-specific characters deduced from the input-method settings.

Calendar

Another new application that previewed in 3.16. Improvements since then:

• Much improved keyboard navigation
• Calendar management dialog
• Many cleanups and bugfixes

To Do

New preview app for 3.18. Personal task manager which follows the GNOME 3 design patterns.

Logs

• Better layout - single line, monospace only. Makes it more compact and easier to read.
• New controls for changing which boot to view.

Gedit

• support for the Overview map (AKA minimap)
• new plugin: find text in all files in a directory (in the gedit-plugins module)

News

New preview app for 3.18. Feed reader which follows the GNOME 3 design patterns.

Maps

• New user location dot that can show heading
• Possible to store and complete against recent routes
• Support for entering latitude/longitude or 'geoURI' in search bar (And actually seeing that location)
• Command line option support for using pre-downloaded map tiles (also works when offline)

Polari

• Improved initial setup experience guiding the user through setting up a connection and joining rooms
• Error handling
• Bugfixes improving the user experience and updated UI visuals.
• Paste Service Integration

Boxes

• New list view.

• Add toggle buttons to titlebar to easily filter the main view to show:
  • All
  • Remote or
  • Local boxes
• Show IP/hostname of boxes under their thumbnails.

  • AllanDay: which is shown - IP or hostname? Are they always shown, or just for remote boxes?

  • ZeeshanAli: For local libvirt boxes, their IP. For remote machines, it's the server part of their URL, which could be either hostname or IP.

• A switch to disable autosaving for a box in the 'System' settings.

  • AllanDay: so this is a per box setting? Why would someone want to use this?

  • ZeeshanAli: yes.

• Improved thumbnails and emblems.

  • AllanDay: how have they been improved?

  • ZeeshanAli: well they look better. Small improvements here and there. Details on these bugs:

    • https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730258

    • https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745757

• Enable express installation for Fedora 21 and newer.

  • AllanDay: is this a change that has been made on the GNOME side, or the Fedora side? What type of installation media do you need to use?

  • ZeeshanAli: Mostly in libosinfo but a minor change in Boxes itself was also needed. You use netiso (which is the only installation media available now a days for Fedora anyway).

• Display system notification on install completion.
• Add "Restart" button to properties view, for libvirt machines.
• Add "Force shutdown" option in context and hamburger menu.

Evince

• The browser plugin now supports search.
• Initial support for multimedia contents, PDF videos using GStreamer.
• Highlight annotations are finally supported
• Test annotations can be moved now.
• The UI for adding annotations have been moved from a hidden tab in the sidebar to a toolbar that can be shown from a toggle button in the main toolbar.
• Many other improvements in annotations in general.

Firmware Updates

GNOME Software will automatically check for device firmware updates using the Linux Vendor Firmware Service https://beta-lvfs.rhcloud.com/. If updates are detected for your hardware they are securely downloaded and then applied during an offline update.

Ambient light sensor support

If a light sensor is present, GNOME will now automatically adjust the display brightness in order to adjust for the ambient light level.

Can be tested using a ColorHugALS device for those who don't have built in hardware.

Windows 8 compatible hardware is supported.

A switch in the control center's power panel allows automatic display brightness to be turned on/off.

WebKitGTK+

• IndexedDB
• Mixed content blocking

• New disk cache when using the network process. A lot more efficient and fully integrated with the WebKit loader.

• New web inspector UI and new features as well

• Automatic hyphenation using libhyphen when it's available <-- this is totally broken -- MichaelCatanzaro

• Inhibit screen saver when playing full screen video
• New API for both UI and Web extensions to handle the Editor

• Make WebSQL work <-- this was backported to 3.16 -- MichaelCatanzaro

• API to set the maximum number of web processes per WebKitWebContext

• Improved font matching
• Improve image quality when using newer versions of cairo/pixman.
• Improvements in the overall performance

Documents

• Improved collections dialog (bug report)

Miscellaneous

• GTK+ and the shell now have super smooth spinners.

Wayland port status

• Hi-DPI support for Wayland applications has landed, including Hi-DPI cursor support
• Copy-Paste and Drag-And-Drop among Wayland applications and between Wayland applications and X applications works
• Popup (context menu, tooltip, etc) placement has been fixed in most places (prominently, in gnome-terminal)
• Several more applications have been fixed to work under Wayland (e.g. gnome-system-monitor)
• Animated cursors display flicker-free
• GTK's GL support works under Wayland
• Tons of bug-fixes in both the compositor and the toolkit

What's new for administrators

What's new for developers

GLib

• Threadpools no longer limited to 10 threeds
• Portability improvements:
  • GNotification implemented on OS X
  • GAppInfo registry-based implementation on Windows
• Information about metered networks available in GNetworkMonitor

gdk-pixbuf

• Support for g_autoptr

GTK+

• New tool: gtk-builder-tool to validate and simplify builder ui files
• New typographic features: colored underlines, letterspacing, font features, translucent font colors
• Support for custom font maps and font options
• Output-only windows

• Builtin touchpad gesture support in GtkGesture

Clutter

• Prefer OpenGL 3.x contexts, if available, and fall back to the old legacy GL API if not.
• Support touchpad gesture events with the libinput backend; this can be used by Clutter-based Wayland compositors, like GNOME Shell.

• Allow binding GListModel implementations to ClutterActor instances, to automatically create actors from objects stored inside models.

• Improvements all around with regards to input on X11, Wayland, and GDK.

Builder

New IDE for GNOME. Initially introduced in 3.16 as an early preview, has received a lot of attention, thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign. New features since 3.16 include:

• a new panel system to embed project tree, build targets list, documentation index, symbols list, terminal, perf monitor…
• Editor shortcuts overview listing keyboard shortcuts, touch and touchpad gestures available in GNOME Builder.
• more (better) syntax/semantic highlighting
• improved completion
  • jedi is used for Python and it has some GObject introspection support

Sandboxed Apps

Work has progressed on xdg-app, and it is now an official freedesktop project with releases in several distributions. The sandboxing aspects are still very much a work in progress though, although some initial experimental work is available. There is an official Gnome runtime and SDK with builds available at sdk.gnome.org that you can use to build and host your applications. For now there is only a 3.16 version, but work on a 3.18 version is ongoing.

Once we have initial 3.18 builds I'll write a page with simple instructions on testing this.

Human Interface Guidelines

• Updated and expanded to include new design patterns.
• Restructured to be simpler and easier to navigate.

Handy links